There is much research on consumption-savings problems with risky labor income and a constant interest rate and also on portfolio allocation with risky returns but nonstochastic labor income. Less is known quantitatively about the interaction between the two forms of risk. Under CRRA utility,...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlations between (a) deflation and depression and (b) unexpected deflation and depression. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected deflation or inflation for 26 countries from 1922 to 1939. The results...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion across 32 Swedish towns for 19 commodities from 1732 to 1914. The resulting large number of relative prices (502,689) allows precise estimation of distance and time effects, and their interaction. We find an...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

A well-known feature of one-good, multi-agent, Arrow-Debreu economies with identical additively-separable, homothetic preferences is that the consumptions of all agents are perfectly correlated. Such economies are widely used in interpreting business cycles but seem to be inconsistent with...

This chapter reviews calibration techniques in macroeconomics. The discussion designs with an outline of the use of calibration in applied work. Next, a simple asset-pricing model is the setting for a demonstration of calibration and for comparison with conventional estimation and testing....

International risk-sharing which diversifies away income risk will reduced saving, with constant relative risk aversion. It growth arises from the external effects of human capital accumulation then reducing saving will reduced growth. Welfare also may fall with risk-sharing, because endogenous...

Business cycles may be defined or measured by parametrizing detrending filters to maximize the ability of a business-cycle model to match the moments of the remaining cycles. Thus a theory can be used to guide cycle measurement. We present two applications to U.S. postwar data. In the first...